Yassin Alsalman, aka hip-hop artist "The Narcicyst," sits down with Democracy Now! senior producer Sharif Abdel Koudous.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: We’re joined here by Yassin Alsalman, better known as The Narcicyst, a member of the Arab hip-hop community, based in Montreal.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
YASSIN ALSALMAN: Thank you for having me. Thank you for always supporting my music.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Thank you. So, tell us—talk about this Arab hip-hop community that has been growing over these last few years.
YASSIN ALSALMAN: Well, I started rhyming in—I mean officially hitting studios in about 2000. So it’s been a good 10 years, 11 years now that I’ve been recording. And, you know, as time grew and as the social media networks became more prominent in the life of the artist, we started bridging internationally. And I noticed that this was a phenomenon that was going on all over the world, be it in the Middle East, North America, Europe, Australia. You know, Arabs from everywhere that had immigrated, even the ones that had stayed home, were using hip-hop as a vocation and a social mediation, if you will, to translate their experience into music. And, you know, especially in the last five years with everything that has gone on, from the several war theaters that were projected upon the Middle East to the revolutions that are happening right now, hip-hop has been a prominent voice in all these things. So, you know, there’s MCs from everywhere, and I think only now is it time for us to be heard on a, quote-unquote, "pop" level, but more on a cultural level, where the significance of what we’re doing is very important for the movement.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And talk about your background. Your parents are from Iraq?
YASSIN ALSALMAN: Yeah, my parents are both Iraqi, originally from Basra, so in the south. They left there in the '70s and moved to the Emirates, where I was born. And we moved out to Canada in the mid-'80s, and I’ve been there ever since. But I went back and forth between the UAE, for my education—the UAE and Montreal. And I’ve been back to Montreal since 2000, where I started recording. I went to Concordia University, did my BA there, and then did my master’s degree in hip-hop and identity in the Media Studies Department at Concordia.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And how did the U.S. invasion of Iraq affect you?
YASSIN ALSALMAN: Well, personally it affected me in a great way. You know, a lot of my family was still out there. A lot of my younger cousins were still living there. So we helped get them out of there to safety. You know, one pair of my grandparents was living there, and my grandmother passed away in 2005, 2004, due to cancer, and they say that was from the water, contamination there. So, you know, it affected me on a very personal level, where I saw the effects of the war upon my cousins in the way they dealt with regular things that we take for great, like watching action movies and hearing gunshots that—you know, my younger cousin would cover his ears when gunshots would go off in films. And the trauma was big, you know, but they still knew how to live and knew how to deal with things. I think if I had went through it, I’d probably be way more traumatized.
And on an artistic level, it obviously affected the content of my music, because I felt like there weren’t that many voices speaking out against it, be it in the hip-hop community, in the cultural community, in the artistic community. There was a lot of more visual stuff that was coming out, but not that much sonic or auditory stuff. So, you know, my first albums with Euphrates dealt very much with the war, you know, the march to war and then the march after the war. And then my solo record deals with, you know, the outcome of being a Westernized Arab that dealt with his motherland being stripped away from him through war theaters and several destructive wars upon our country, especially the effect on the youth.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, talk about that. Some of your lyrics take on how Arabs and Muslims are viewed in the West.
YASSIN ALSALMAN: Yeah, I mean, you know, in the beginning my music was extremely political. And I wouldn’t say "political" more than I would say "politicized." You know, it was very much dealing with direct issues that politics had—how politics had affected our lives on the daily level, be it through profiling at airports or, you know, just the stereotypes that are engendered through Hollywood film, through regular pop culture, even through hip-hop music that I listen to, and how that isn’t helping, you know?
But as I became more involved in the art and presentation, and especially having studied communications and media studies, how can you turn that, you know, that message into the medium and the medium into the message, sort of, you know? How do you use that in a way where people who don’t care or people who don’t want to hear about our experience, how can you translate that into something that’s palatable to those people, without sacrificing the content? So, more recently it’s been about my personal life and personalizing the, quote-unquote, "struggle" or my personal struggle, and how that relates to somebody’s struggle in Brooklyn or somebody’s struggle in, you know, Los Angeles or somebody’s struggle in Denmark, or—you know, so—because at the end of the day we’re all human beings, and if you strip all these layers of conditioning that are put onto our identity, then you realize that, at the end of the day, we’re all fighting the same battle, which is against a destructive system of economic and political repression.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, let’s talk about some of your more recent work. There’s been uprisings now across the Middle East, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain. You have a song called "Hashtag January 25th" ["#Jan25"]. Let’s go to a clip of that song.
["#Jan25"]
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: That’s "Hashtag January 25th" ["#Jan25"]. Talk about this song and why you participated in it.
YASSIN ALSALMAN: Well, you know, I first got contacted by somebody I call "my partner in rhyme," Omar Offendum, who’s a Syrian American MC based out of Los Angeles. He wrote me and said, you know, "My friend Sami Matar," who’s a Palestinian American producer, "produced a song, and he wants us to do it for Egypt." He sent it over to me. I wrote a verse. And then we sent it over to an African American rapper called Freeway, who is very dominant in the hip-hop scene, very great individual as well as an artist. So he wrote a verse. And then we had Amir Sulaiman, who was a Def Poet, he wrote a verse.
And then we felt we needed a lady’s voice on the song. It was very important to incorporate the lady because, you know, ladies were a big part of the revolution, you know? And they’ve always been a very strong part of the Arab community, be it in the home or in society. So we contacted Ayah, who’s a Palestinian Canadian singer. And that’s how the song came together.
It came also together under the helm of an individual called Amir Abbassy, who’s a—he owns a company called Blamethelabel, and he’s a artist—you know, artists—he represents artists, and he’s actually Egyptian. So, it all came together under that.
And then we tried to spread it out to as many mediums as we could. So we got it out to like Vibe magazine and several publications that wouldn’t necessarily deal with political issues. But because this was such an important humanitarian issue, I think a lot of people felt the need to cover it. And it reached a lot of places we didn’t think it would reach. And Omar was actually in Doha when we released it, so he did a couple of interviews on Al Jazeera about it.
The importance of the song was to show solidarity with the Egyptian people. Being that we’re here, and they’re there, and, you know, voices get lost in between, we wanted to just say, "Look, we’re watching you 24 hours a day. We really appreciate your integrity and the way that you’ve been dealing with this, and that showing the world that it’s possible to knock down a 30-year, you know, oppressive regime in 18 days, which was—you know, five years ago we would have never even thought about it. And you guys showed us the will and the way and the want for change, and I think that’s the most important thing."
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And hip-hop is viewed, as you said, in many places around the world as an art form of resistance.
YASSIN ALSALMAN: Mm-hmm.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Can you talk about that? Why do you think that is?
YASSIN ALSALMAN: I mean, you know, hip-hop was born out of a situation of trying to bring people together outside of violence. And not to say that that’s all hip-hop was. Hip-hop was a jam where people came together and let go of all the negativity that was surrounding them and holding them down, and just had a good time together. And I think that translated, because all societies that are under oppressive situations, or even being subjugated to racism or profiling or any form of oppression, have used hip-hop to facilitate their voice and be able to create a space for them to navigate in that the regular media, or the media that does engender people or racialize people, have no control over. Within the span of 45 seconds, I can share with you an entire experience, uncut, unedited, that wouldn’t be able to be shared on a news network that is—or, you know, a regular print media or whatever. It’s unedited. It’s straight from me to the listener.
So, I think this is what translates the most in hip-hop is that ability, and also the permeability of the creative process, or the facilitating of the creative process. All you really need is a microphone and a pair of headphones to record, and then a good engineer to mix it. So, it doesn’t really take much to create it, as well. It’s not like a rock song, where you have to record a whole band. So I think these are the two things that facilitate the music being such a strong force for the youth in the Middle East, is that it’s so immediate, it can be put out immediately.
And, you know, brothers out in Egypt put out songs while the revolution was going on. You know, Arabian Knightz put out a song with Shadia Mansour, days within the revolution. So, even in Tunisia, an MC called El General was one of the reasons the whole thing started. He put out a song against the government, and then Mohamed Bouazizi burnt himself alive. [in Arabic]. And these are the things that sparked the revolution. So youth culture is very much in the forefront of what’s going on.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: I want to play a clip from your latest track. It’s called "Hamdulilah."
["Hamdulilah"]
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: That’s a clip from the latest track by The Narcicyst, "Hamdulilah." Explain what we see in the video, a lot of different faces of Arab people, and what the song is about.
YASSIN ALSALMAN: Well, you know, during Ramadan, I had reached out to my brother, Ridwan Adhami, out here. He’s a Syrian American—well, Syrian, but raised in America, photographer. RidzDesign is his company. And his style is very much, you know, raw, human. And that’s what attracted me to his work. And I told him, "I want to put out a video to show the diverse faces that are within our culture." And when I say "our culture," it could be Islam, it could be Arab culture, but it could also be this youth culture that we speak of, this diverse community that is an international group of immigrants that share one common thing, which is an identity struggle.
So we put a call out on Twitter and Facebook to videographers all around the world, saying, "If you want to partake in this video, here are the guidelines that you have to follow." And next thing you know, we had people’s faces from Australia, London, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Dubai, Jeddah. People from all over the world started sending us footage. And that was a telltale of how powerful the music can be if you involve the people. You know, without the fans or without the people that listen to the music, we, as artists, don’t have much, you know? We don’t have ears to be heard. And we put the video out, and then it got posted on Facebook like 30,000 times. So, this video was really about the power of the people.
You know, a lot of the time our faces are painted on television the way, you know, the media want to represent us. In this case, we wanted to show our faces ourselves and have that power within our hands. And I put that power in the hands of the people, and they showed us how powerful they can be. So, that was the meaning of the video. The meaning of the song was really about my family and the importance of friends and the personal things in life.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And what’s your upcoming project that you’re working on now?
YASSIN ALSALMAN: I’m about to release a book, a limited run of my book, called The Diatribes of a Dying Tribe, which is a book about the creation of the Arab Summit album, as well as the—you know, the first couple of years of the birth of this Arab hip-hop movement that we’re a part of now. It includes a bit of writing by Suheir Hammad, Omar Offendum, Nizar Wattad and Tarik Kazaleh, as well as myself, and all the lyrics from the album, The Arab Summit: Fear of an Arab Planet, which will come with the book. It’s been out for five years now, so this is like the five-year anniversary. It’s really about the experience of releasing an album in North America and the juxtaposing worlds of, you know, politics and music and how confusing it can be sometimes and how disenchanting it can be sometimes.
And then I’m also working on my next record, my next solo record, right now. It’s still in its infantile phases, but those are the things I’m working on, shooting videos and staying on the grind, if you will.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And any final words to our listeners and viewers? You know, we broadcast on 950 stations around the United States, but also around the world.
YASSIN ALSALMAN: Well, you know, if you get a chance to listen to the music, please visit iraqisthebomb.com. That’s my website. You know, follow all the wonderful artists, from Shadia Mansour to Omar Offendum, to Lowkey, to Freeway, to myself, to Ayah, to anybody that is in this hip-hop community. And, you know, we were out here in New York doing a show with Existence is Resistance, so if you can look up Existence is Resistance and support causes like that, they send people to Palestine to educate them on what goes on in Philistine.
So, you know, just look up the movement and realize that it’s a multifaceted movement and that we don’t—we aren’t propaganda. We just speak our experience, that is very important to be heard. And I think in the next 10 years or so, this will be a regular part of everyday culture, and people will accept us within the larger community of humanity, if you will.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Yassin Alsalman, better known as The Narcicyst, thank you very much.
Why was the story of Orpheus THE opera topic in the first century of its history, when there are recorded almost one hundred versions of it? The figure of Orpheus asking Gods to bring him back his Euridice stands for an intersubjecive constellation which provides as it were the elementary matrix of the opera, more precisely, of the operatic aria: the relationship of the subject (in both senses of the term: autonomous agent as well as the subject of legal power) to his Master (Divinity, King, or the Lady of the courtly love) is revealed through the hero's song (the counterpoint to the collectivity embodied in the chorus), which is basically a supplication addressed to the Master, a call to him to show mercy, to make an exception, or otherwise forgive the hero his trespass. The first, rudimentary, form of subjectivity is this voice of the subject beseeching the Master to suspend, for a brief moment, his own Law. A dramatic tension in subjectivity arises from the ambiguity between power and impotence that pertains to the gesture of grace by means of which the Master answers the subject's entreaty. As to the official ideology, grace expresses the Master's supreme power, the power to rise above one's own law: only a really powerful Master can afford to distribute mercy. What we have here is a kind of symbolic exchange between the human subject and his divine Master: when the subject, the human mortal, by way of his offer of self-sacrifice, surmounts his finitude and attains the divine heights, the Master responds with the sublime gesture of Grace, the ultimate proof of HIS humanity. Yet this act of grace is at the same time branded by the irreducible mark of a forced empty gesture: the Master ultimately makes a virtue out of necessity, in that he promotes as a free act what he is in any case compelled to do - if he refuses clemency, he takes the risk that the subject's respectful entreaty will turn into open rebellion.
For that reason, the temporal proximity of the emergence of opera to Descartes' formulation of cogito is more that a fortuitous coincidence: one is even tempted to say that the move from Monteverdi's Orfeo to Gluck's Orpheus and Euridice corresponds to the move from Descartes to Kant. What Gluck contributed was a new form of subjectivization. In Monteverdi we have sublimation in its purest: after Orpheus turns around to cast a glance at Euridice and thus loses her, the Divinity consoles him - true, he has lost her as a flesh-and-blood person, but from now on, he will be able to discern her beautiful features everywhere, in the stars in the sky, in the glistening of the morning dew... Orpheus is quick to accept the narcissistic profit of this reversal: he becomes enraptured with the poetic glorification of Euridice that lies ahead of him - to put it succinctly, he no longer loves HER, what he loves is the vision of HIMSELF displaying his love for her.
This, of course, throws another light on the eternal question of why Orpheus looked back and thus screwed things up. What we encounter here is simply the link between the death-drive and creative sublimation: Orpheus' backward gaze is a perverse act stricto sensu, he loses Euridice intentionally in order to regain her as the object of sublime poetic inspiration (this idea was developed by Klaus Theweleit1). But should one not go here even a step further? What if Euridice herself, aware of the impasse of her beloved Orpheus, intentionally provoked his turning around? What if her reasoning was something like: "I know he loves me; but he is potentially a great poet, this is his fate, and he cannot fulfill that promise by being happily married to me - so the only ethical thing for me to do is to sacrifice myself, to provoke him into turning around and losing me, so that he will be able to become the great poet he deserves to be - and then she starts gently coughing or something similar to attract his attention... Examples are here innumerable: like Euridice who, by sacrificing herself, i.e. by intentionally provoking Orpheus into turning his gaze towards her and thus sending her back to Hades, delivers his creativity and sets him free to pursue his poetic mission, Elsa in Wagner's Lohengrin also intentionally asks the fateful question and thereby delivers Lohengrin whose true desire, of course, is to remain the lone artist sublimating his suffering into his creativity. Wagner's Bruenhilde, this "suffering, self-sacrificing woman," is here the ultimate example: she wills her annihilation, but not as a desperate means to compensate for her guilt - she wills it as an act of love destined to redeem the beloved man, or, as Wagner himself put it in a famous letter to Franz Liszt: "The love of a tender woman has made me happy; she dared to throw herself into a sea of suffering and agony so that she should be able to say to me 'I love you!' No one who does not know all her tenderness can judge how much she had to suffer. We were spared nothing - but as a consequence I am redeemed and she is blessedly happy because she is aware of it." Once again, we should descend here from the mythic heights into the everyday bourgeois reality: woman is aware of the fact that, by means of her suffering which remains invisible to the public eye, of her renunciation for the beloved man and/or her renunciation to him (the two are always dialectically interconnected, since, in the fantasmatic logic of the Western ideology of love, it is for the sake of her man that the woman must renounce him), she rendered possible man's redemption, his public social triumph - like Traviata who abandons her lover and thus enables his reintegration into the social order.
With Gluck, however, the denouement is completely different: after looking back and thus losing Euridice, Orpheus sings his famous aria "Che faro senza Euridice," announcing his intention to kill himself. At this precise point of total self-abandonment, Love intervenes and gives him back his Euridice. This specific form of subjectivization - the intervention of Grace not as a simple answer to the subject's entreaty, but as an answer which occurs in the very moment when the subject decides to put his life at stake, to risk everything - is the twist added by Gluck. What is crucial here is the link between the assertion of subjective autonomy and the "answer of the Real," the mercy shown by the big Other: far from being opposed, they rely on each other, i.e., the modern subject can assert its radical autonomy only insofar as it can count on the support of the "big Other," only insofar as his autonomy is sustained by the social substance. No wonder this gesture of "autonomy and mercy," of mercy intervening at the very point of the subject's assertion of full autonomy, is discernible throughout the history of the opera, from Mozart to Wagner: in Idomeneo and Seraglio, the Other (Neptun, Basha Selim) displays mercy at the very moment when the hero is ready to sacrifice his/her life, and the same happens even twice in The Magic Flute (the magic intervention of the Other prevents both Pamina's and Papageno's suicide); in Fidelio, the trumpet anounces the Minister's arrival at the very point when Leonora puts her life at stake to save Florestan; up to Wagner's Parsifal in which Parsifal himself intervenes and redeems Amfortas precisely when Amfortas asks to be stabbed to death by his knights.
What occurs between Monteverdi and Gluck is thus the "failure of sublimation": the subject is no longer ready to accept the metaphoric substitution, to exchange "being for meaning," i.e., the flesh-and-blood presence of the beloved for the fact that he will be able to see her everywhere, in stars and the moon, etc. - rather than do this, he prefers to take his life, to lose it all, and it is at this point, to fill in the refusal of sublimation, of its metaphoric exchange, that mercy has to intervene to prevent a total catastrophy. This "failure of sublimation" is discernible also at another level. At the beginning of Monteverdi's Orfeo, the Goddess of Music introduces herself with the words "Io sono la musica..." - is this not something which soon afterwards, when "psychological" subjects invaded the stage, became unthinkable, or, rather, irrepresentable? One had to wait until the 1930s for such strange creatures to reappear on the stage. In Bertolt Brecht's "learning plays," an actor enters the stage and addresses the public: "I am a capitalist. I'll now approach a worker and try to deceive him with my talk of the equity of capitalism..." The charm of this procedure resides in the psychologically "impossible" combination, in one and the same actor, of two distinct roles, as if a person from the play's diegetic reality can also, from time to time, step outside himself and utter "objective" comments about his acts and attitudes. This second role is the descendant of Prologue, a unique figure which often appears in Shakespeare, but which later disappears with the advent of psychological-realist theatre: an actor who, at the beginning, between the scenes or at the end, addresses the public directly with explanatory comments, didactic or ironic points about the play, etc. Prologue thus effectively functions as the Freudian Vorstellungs-Repraesentanz: an element which, on stage, within its diegetic reality of representations, holds the place of the mechanism of representing as such, thereby introducing the moment of distance, interpretation, ironic comment - and, for that reason, it had to disappear with the victory of psychological realism. Things are here even more complex than in a naive version of Brecht: the uncanny effect of Prologue does not hinge on the fact that he "disturbs the stage illusion" but, on the contrary, on the fact that he does NOT disturb it. Notwithstanding his comments and their effect of "extraneation," we, the spectators, are still able to participate in the stage illusion. And, this is how one should also locate Jacques Lacan's c'est moi, la vérité, qui parle from his La Chose freudienne: as the same shocking emergence of a word where one would not expect it - it is the Thing itself which starts to speak.
And it is not only that, with Gluck, the object can no longer sing - this shift does not concern only content, but, even more radically, the musical texture itself. With Romanticism, music changes its role: it is no longer a mere accompaniment of the message delivered in speech, it contains/renders a message of its own, deeper than the one delivered in words. It was Rousseau who first clearly articulated this expressive potential of music as such, when he claimed that, instead of merely imitating the affective features of verbal speech, music should be given the right to speak for itself - in contrast to the deceiving verbal speech, in music, it is, to paraphrase Lacan, the truth itself which speaks. As Schopenhauer put it, music directly enacts/renders the noumenal Will, while speech remains limited to the level of phenomenal representations. Music is the substance which renders the true heart of the subject, which is what Hegel called the "Night of the World," the abyss of radical negativity: with the shift from the Enlightenment subject of rational logos to the Romantic subject of the "night of the world," i.e., with the shift of the metaphor for the kernel of the subject from Day to Night, music becomes the bearer of the true message beyond words. Here we encounter das Unheimliche: no longer the external transcendence, but, following Kant's transcendental turn, the excess of the Night in the very heart of the subject (the dimension of the Undead), what Tomlison called the "internal otherworldliness that marks the Kantian subject." What music renders is no longer the semantics of the soul, but the underlying noumenal flux of jouissance beyond the linguistic meaningfulness. This noumenal dimension is radically different from the pre-Kantian transcendent divine Truth: it is the inaccessible excess which forms the very core of the subject.
With Gluck, we thus enter the Romantic universe of the abyssal inner Life, the universe in which the classic sublimation no longer works, in which things (and notions) can no longer sing. However, Gluck is not the end of the (hi)story: he stands for the very early gestation of Romanticism. In the middle of 19th century, the Romantic excesses themselves are domesticated, the standard bourgeois "psychological realism" establishes its reign, and in this new age, Gluck's version itself no longer works. To paraphrase Marx, what was a tragedy repeats itself as a comedy, i.e., it can only be staged as a comic operetta, and this comic operetta effectively exists - it is Orphée aux enfers, Jacques Offenbach's opéra bouffon in two acts (1858, libretto by Hector-Jonathan Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy). The "Music" from Monteverdi appears here as the Public Opinion, which makes herself known at the outset. Eurydice, unhappily married to Orpheus, whose violin-playing she cannot stand, has a lover, the farmer Aristaeus. Orpheus has laid a trap for him by putting snakes in a cornfield, but Aristaeus lets Eurydice walk there, where she is bitten and dies. Aristaeus turns out to be Pluto, God of the Underworld, so that she is not unhappy to go with him. Orpheus, well rid of her, would be happy enough, were it not for Public Opinion, who insists that he should bring her back from Hades. On Mount Olympus, Venus, Cupid and Mars have been out for the night. They are just home, when Diana's hunting-horn rouses them. Jupiter is displeased at their behaviour and summons Pluto, complaining of his abduction of a mortal. The gods now rebel against Jupiter's hypocrisy, and his own escapades are recalled. Public Opinion arrives, with Orpheus, and Jupiter tells Pluto to give him Eurydice back. Pluto returns to Hades with Jupiter and the latter, in the guise suggested by Cupid of a fly, makes his way through the key-hole into the room where Eurydice is kept under guard. He suggests that they should escape together to Olympus. There is a party in Hades and Jupiter hopes to take Eurydice away with him. Cupid reminds him that Orpheus is on his way, with strait-laced Public Opinion. Cupid suggests the answer. He must allow Orpheus to take Eurydice back with him, provided he does not look round as she follows him. Orpheus does not look round until Jupiter hurls a thunderbolt and shocks him into it. He happily loses Eurydice, who becomes a priestess of Bacchus, god of wine.
The ironic reference of Offenbach to Gluck is clear - say, the can-can of the spirits below is an obvious wicked parody of Gluck's sedate Dance of the Blessed Spirits. This, then, is how one should understand Hector Berlioz' reworking of Gluck's Orpheus which was performed in 1859, exactly a year after the premiere of Offenbach's parody: the problem is, again, how to prevent the opera to slide into ridicule, how to guarantee that it will still be experienced as serious and convincing. If Gluck is the answer to the failure of symbolization, to the new universe in which objects and ideas can no longer directly sing, Berlioz' version is the answer to the new times of "psychological realism" in which the pathetic spectacle of the courtly opera cannot but appear ridiculous. And the fact that, even today, the Berlioz version remains the standard, the most often performed one, is a clear indication of the extent to which the ideology of "psychological realism" continues to dominate.
Perhaps the best way to detect what is at stake in these shifts is to follow the changes in the voice which sings Orpheus in Gluck's opera. In the original version of 1762 (small and ceremonial, for a court occasion of crowning), it was a castrato; for a 1769 staging in Parma, Gluck himself rewrote the part for soprano; finally, in the thoroughly reworked version for the Paris staging in 1774 (Grand Opera style for the large public, with added preludes and ballet), Orpheus was sung by a high tenor. In 1859, when Berlioz shortened the opera again and made is less large, he rewrote Orpheus for contra-alto/mezzosoprano. In a first approach, this cannot but appear strange: why not stick to high tenor? If Berlioz' concern was to restore Orpheus to its "natural" state, what can be more "unnatural" than the return to the classic tradition of women singing male roles? Why did this sex discrepancy survive in the era of bourgeois naturalization? There is only one consistent answer: because, in the high era of the bourgeois ideology, the gesture of offering oneself to self-sacrifice performed by Orpheus at the opera's highpoint can be conceived only as feminine - it is no longer compatible with the dignity of a man to perform it. Irrespective of the "official" sex identity of the person who enacts it on the stage, the psychological truth of the gesture is feminine, which is why the voice (which should follow the "inner" truth, not the visible truth of what takes place on the stage) should be feminine - it is as if Berlioz followed the well-known joke from the 18th century comedy, when a wife caught by her husband in bed with a lover denies the obvious and adds: "Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?" The implied answer is, of course: if you truly love me, you will believe my words - and Berlioz demands from us the same, not to believe our eyes, but what the voice tells us. This, then, is the key point: although Berlioz returned to the classic tradition of women singing male roles, he did it for the exactly opposite reason: not in order to follow a ritualized tradition, but on behalf of inner psychological truth - do we need a more striking proof of the material efficiency of ideology?
Does this mean that, in order to break out of the ideological mould, one should simply return to the "natural" constellation of a man singing a male role? But what if there is a more radical option - perhaps an idea for a new staging: to present Orpheus and Euridice as a "lesbian couple"? What if this is the ultimate reason why their love is doomed to fail? So why should we not take Berlioz more seriously (and literally) than he was ready to take himself, and openly stage the very psychological truth he was promoting?
Rossini's great male portraits, the three from Barbiere (Figaro's "Largo il factotum," Basilio's "Calumnia," and Bartolo's "Un dottor della mia sorte"), plus father's wishful self-portrait of corruption in Cenerentola, enact a mocked self-complaint, where one imagines oneself in a desired position, the one bombarded by demands for a favor or service: the subject assumes the roles of those who address him, and then feigns a reaction to it. The culminating moment of the archetypal Rossini aria is this unique moment of happiness, of the full assertion of the excess of Life, which arises when the subject is overwhelmed by demands, no longer being able to deal with them. At the highpoint of his "factotum" aria, Figaro exclaims:
"What a crowd
of the people bombarding me with their demands
Have mercy, one after the other uno per volta, per carita! "
Referring therewith to the Kantian experience of the Sublime, in which the subject is bombarded with an excess of the data that he is unable to comprehend. And do we not encounter a similar excess in Mozart's Clemenza - a same sublime/ridiculous explosion of mercies? Just before the final pardon, Tito himself exasperates at the proliferation of treasons which oblige him to proliferate acts of clemency:
"The very moment that I absolve one criminal, I discover another. /.../ I believe the stars conspire to oblige me, in spite of myself, to become cruel. No: they shall not have this satisfaction. My virtue has already pledged itself to continue the contest. Let us see, which is more constant, the treachery of others or my mercy. /.../ Let it be known to Rome that I am the same and that I know all, absolve everyone, and forget everything."
One can almost hear Tito complaining: Uno per volta, per carita! - "Please, not so fast, one after the other, in the line for mercy!" Living up to his task, Tito forgets everyone, but those whom he pardons are condemned to remember it forever:
SEXTUS: It is true, you pardon me, Emperor; but my heart will not absolve me; it will lament the error until it no longer has memory.
TITUS: The true repentance of which you are capable, is worth more than constant fidelity.
This couplet from the finale blurts out the obscene secret of clemenza: the pardon does not really abolish the debt, it rather makes it infinite - we are FOREVER indebted to the person who pardoned us. No wonder Tito prefers repentance to fidelity: in fidelity to the Master, I follow him out of respect, while in repentance, what attached me to the Master is the infinite indelible guilt. In this, Tito is a thoroughly Christian master.
Usually, it is Judaism which is conceived as the religion of the superego (of man's subordination to the jealous, mighty and severe God), in contrast to the Christian God of Mercy and Love - one opposes the Jewish rigorous Justice and the Christian Mercy, the inexplicable gesture of undeserved pardon: we, humans, were born in sin, we cannot ever repay our debts and redeem ourselves through our own acts - our only salvation lies in God's Mercy, in His supreme sacrifice. However, in this very gesture of breaking the chain of Justice through the inexplicable act of Mercy, of paying our debt, Christianity imposes on us an even stronger debt: we are forever indebted to Christ, we cannot ever repay him for what he did to us. The Freudian name for such an excessive pressure which we cannot ever remunerate is, of course, superego. It is precisely through NOT demanding from us the price for our sins, through paying this price for us Himself, that the Christian God of Mercy establishes itself as the supreme superego agency: "I paid the highest price for your sins, and you are thus indebted to me FOREVER..." Is this God as the superego agency, whose very Mercy generates the indelible guilt of believers, the ultimate horizon of Christianity? One should effectively correlate the superego unconditional guilt and the mercy of love - two figures of the excess, the excess of guilt without proportion to what I effectively did, and the excess of mercy without proportion to what I deserve on account of my acts.
As such, the dispensation of mercy is the most efficient constituent of the exercise of power. That is to say, is the relationship between law (legal justice) and mercy really the one between necessity and choice? Is it really that one HAS to obey the law, while mercy is by definition dispensed as a free and excessive act, as something that the agent of mercy is free to do or not to do - mercy under compulsion is no mercy but, at its best, a travesty of mercy? What if, at a deeper level, the relationship is the opposite one? What if, with regard to law, we have the freedom to choose (to obey or violate it), while mercy is obligatory, we HAVE to display it - mercy is an unnecessary excess which, as such, HAS to occur. (And does the law not always take into account this freedom of ours, not only by punishing us for its transgression, but by providing escapes to being punished by its ambiguity and inconsistency?) Is it not that showing mercy is the ONLY way for a Master te demonstrate his supra-legal authority? If a Master were merely to guarantee the full application of the law, of legal regulations, he would be deprived of his authority and turn into a mere figure of knowledge, the agent of the discourse of university. (This is why even a great judge is a Master figure: he always somehow twists the law in its application by way of interpreting it creatively.) This goes even for Stalin himself, a figure which we definitely do not associate with mercy: one should never forget that, as the (now available) minutes of the meetings of the Politburo and Central Committee from the 1930s demonstrate, Stalin's direct interventions were as a rule those of displaying mercy. When younger CC members, eager to prove their revolutionary fervour, demanded instant death penalty for Bukharin, Stalin always intervened and said "Patience! His guilt is not yet proven!" or something similar. Of course this was a hypocritical attitude - Stalin was well aware that he himself generated the destructive fervour, that the younger members were eager to please him - but, nonetheless, the appearance of mercy is necessary here.
And, if anything, in our late capitalist societies, this perverse logic of mercy is brought to extreme, as the ultimate expression of the weird unity of the opposites that permeates our attitudes. Today's hedonism combines pleasure with constraint - it is no longer the old notion of the right measure between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of the opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction "Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!", i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner's famous "Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it" from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking...) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today's biopolitics. Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is safe sex - a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying "Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?". The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent opium without opium: no wonder marihuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it - it already IS a kind of opium without opium.
We encounter the same unity of opposites in the new capitalist ethics, where the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity. Commendable as it is in itself, Bill Gates' charitable activity of gigantic proportions in no way redeems his economic pursuits. More generally, charity is, today, part of the game as a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation: in a superego-blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries are constantly helping the undeveloped (with aid, credits, etc.), thereby avoiding the key issue, namely, their COMPLICITY in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped.
And the same paradox occurs even at the military level of the "war on terror." The category of homo sacer, reactualized recently by Giorgio Agamben - those who, according to the ancient Roman law, could have been killed with impunity and whose death was, for the same reason, without any sacrificial value -, is best fitted to cover this newly emerging entity of the excluded, who are not only terrorists, but also those who are on the receiving end of the humanitarian help (Ruandans, Bosnians, Afghanis...): today's homo sacer is the privileged object of the humanitarian biopolitics - in both cases, the population is reduced to an object of biopolitics. It is thus is absolutely crucial to supplement the usual list of today's homo sacer (les sans papiers in France, the inhabitants of the favelas in Brasil, the African-American ghettos in the US, etc.) with the humanitarian side: perhaps, those perceived as the receivers of humanitarian aid are THE figure of homo sacer today.
One should therefore assume the paradox that concentration camps and refugee camps for the delivery of humanitarian aid are the two faces, "human" and "inhuman," of the same socio-logical formal matrix. This is another facet of the new global order: we no longer have wars in the old sense of the regulated conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (the treatment of prisoners, the prohibition of certain weapons., etc.). What remains are two types of conflicts: either struggles between groups of homo sacer, i.e. ethnic-religious conflicts which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call for the ťhumanitarian pacifistŤ intervention of the Western powers, or direct attacks on the US or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, but merely ťunlawful combatantsŤ resisting forces of universal order. In this second case, one cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organization like the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organizing the exchange of prisoners, etc.: one side in the conflict (the US-dominated global force) ALREADY ASSUMES THE ROLE OF THE RED CROSS - it does not perceive itself as one of the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order crushing down particular rebellions and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the local populations. This weird coincidence of the opposites reached its peak when, in April 2002, Harald Nasvik, a Right-wing member of the Norvegian parliament, proposed George W. Bush and Tony Blair as the candidates for the Nobel peace prize, quoting their decisive role in the "war on terror" as the greatest threat to peace today - the old Orwellian motto "War is Peace" finally becomes reality, so that, sometimes, military action against Taliban is almost presented as a means to guarantee the safe delivery of the humanitarian aid. We thus no longer have the opposition between war and humanitarian aid: the two are closely connected, THE SAME intervention can function at two levels simultaneously: the toppling of the Taliban regime was presented as part of the strategy to help the Afghani people oppressed by the Taliban - as Tony Blair said in September 2001, perhaps, we will have to throw more bombs on Afghanistan in order to secure the food transportation and distribution. Perhaps, the ultimate image of the treatment of the local population as homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying above Afghanistan - one is never sure what it will drop, bombs or food parcels. War itself, the ruthless bombing destined not only to annihilate the enemy, but to produce "shock and awe," is legitimized as being in the service of mercy... It is against this historical background that we should read today Mozart's Clemenza. The entire canon of Mozart's great operas can be read as the deployment of the motif of pardon, of dispensing mercy, in all its variations. The first two masterpieces, Idomeneo and Die Entfuehrung, still rely on the traditional absolutist-monarchic figure of the Master dispensing mercy: at the very point of the lowest despair, when the hero heroically assumes readiness to die, to sacrifice himself for the beloved, the authority intervenes and shows mercy. Le nozze di Figaro marks the first big break: in its finale, it is the Master himself (the Count) who, in the inversion of the ťnormalŤ situation, has to kneal down and ask for mercy from his wife and his subjects, and when he is pardoned by them, the opera can conclude with the assertion of universal brotherhood. Don Giovanni introduces an additional twist: in the terrifying finale, when confronted with the Stone Guest, the hero is offered mercy if he just renounces his sinful past and repents, but don Giovanni proudly rejects the offer, preferring eternal damnation to betraying his existential choice of seducer. The lowest point is reached in Cosi fan tutte, the only Mozart's opera with a failed finale; however, far from condemning this failure, one should perceive it, in an Adornian way, as anh injdication of Mozart's truthfulness - after the abyssal imbroglio of betrayals, any reconciliation of the two couples can only be a fake. With The Magic Flute, the reign of mercy is reinstalled, but with a price: the register shifts from the grim realism of Don Giovanni and Cosi... to the artificially resuscitated fairy-tale magic.
And, in order to grasp properly the place of La clemenza, it is crucial to read it together with The Magic Flute. The ridiculous proliferation of mercy in Clemenza means that power no longer functions in a normal way, so that it has to be sustained by mercy all the time: if Master has to show mercy, it means that the law failed, that the legal state machinery is not able to run on its own and needs an incessant intervention from the outside. (One encounters a similar paradox in the state Socialist regimes: when, in a mythical scene from Soviet hagiography, Stalin takes a walk in the fields, meets there a driver whose tractor broke down and helps him to repair it with a wise advice, what this effectively means is that not even a tractor can function normally in the state Socialist economic chaos.)
The obverse, the truth, of the continuous celebration of the wisdom and mercy displayed by Tito is therefore the fact that Tito as a ruler is a fiasco. Instead of relying on the support of faithful subjects, he ends up surrounded by sick and tormented people condemned to eternal guilt. And this sickness is reflected back into Tito himself: far from radiating the dignity of the severe but merciful rulers from the early Mozart's operas, Tito's acts display features of hysterical self-staging: Tito is PLAYING himself all the time, narcissistically fascinated by the faked generosity of his acts. In short, the passage from Basha Selim in Die Entfuehrung to Tito in Clemenza is the passage from the naďve to the sentimental. And, as is usual with Mozart, this falsity of Tito's position is rendered by the music itself which, in a supreme dislay of the much-praised Mozartean irony, effectively undermines the opera's explicit ideological project.
Perhaps, then, the fact that La clemenza was composed in the midst of the work on The Magic Flute is more than a meaningless coincidence: one is tempted to risk the hypothesis that La clemenza is the obverse, the hidden truth, of The Magic Flute, its necessary shadowy double, the obscene reactionary political reality that underlies the reinvented "magic" of the Flute universe. Back in the 1930s, Max Horkheimer wrote that those who do not want to speak (critically) about liberalism should also keep silent about fascism. Mutatis mutandis, one should say to those who detract La clemenza as a failure in comparison with The Magic Flute: those who do not want to engage critically with The Magic Flute should also keep silent about La Clemenza di Tito.
Perhaps the most touching scene of the entire Ring occurs towards the end of Act II of Walkure, when Brunhilde, in her cold majestic beauty, approaches Siegmund, informing him that every mortal who sees her will soon die - she is here to tell him that she will take him to Walhalla after he will lose the battle with Hunding. Siegmund refuses her offer if Sieglinde cannot join him in Walhalla, preferring the love of a miserable mortal woman to Walhall's sproeden Wonnen. The shattered Brunhilde comments on this refusal:
So wenig achtest du ewige Wonne?
Alles waer'dir das arme Weib, das mued und harmwoll matt von dem Schosse dir haengt?
Nichts sonst hieltest du hehr?
This is the core of Wagner's critique of religion: one has to get rid of the old Platonic topos of love as Eros which gradually elevates itself from the love for a particular individual through the love for the beauty of a human body in general and the love of the beautiful form as such to the love for the supreme Good beyond all forms: true love is precisely the opposite move of forsaking the promise of Eternity itself for an imperfect individual. What if the gesture of choosing temporal existence, of giving up eternity for the sake of love, is the highest ethical act of them all? Ernst Bloch was right to remark that what is lacking in German history are more gestures like Siegmund's.
Jurgen Flimm's Ring, which will be repeated in Bayreuth till 2006, is strong precisely at this level of intense intimate interplay; his staging is full of insightful ideas which, of course, sometimes work and sometimes not. Fricka is in Rheingold a careful saving Hausfrau, not the usual majestetic matron; Alberich is in the Act II of Siegfried accompanied by a boy, the young Hagen, whom he already trains for his future combat with Siegfrid (Hagen-boy plays with the small model of a dragon); etc. And Hagen is, together with Wotan and Alberich, the key person of Flimm's staging which presents the Ring as a drama of corrupted state power (Udo Bermbach was Flimm's official ideologue).
The dark figure of Hagen is profoundly ambiguous: although initially depicted as a dark plotter, both in the Nibelungenlied and in Fritz Lang's film, he emerges as the ultimate hero of the entire work and is redeemed at the end as the supreme case of the Nibelungentreue, fidelity to death to one's cause (or, rather, to the Master who stands for this cause), asserted in the final slaughter at the Attila's court. The conflict is here between fidelity to the Master and our everyday moral obligations: Hagen stands for a kind of teleological suspension of morality on behalf of fidelity, he is the ultimate Gefolgsmann.
Significantly, it is ONLY Wagner who depicts Hagen as a figure of Evil - is this not an indication of how Wagner nonetheless belongs to the modern space of freedom? And is Lang's return to the positive Hagen not an indication of how the XXth century marked the reemergence of a new barbarism? It was Wagner's genius to intuit ahead of his time the rising figure of the Fascist ruthless executive who is at the same time a rabble-rousing demagogue (recall Hagen's terrifying Maennerruf) - a worthy supplement to his other great intuition, that of a hysterical woman (Kundry) well before this figure overwhelmed European consciousness (in Charcot's clinic, in the art from Ibsen to Schoenberg). What makes Hagen a proto-Fascist is his role of the unconditional support for the weak ruler (King Gunther): he does for Gunther the dirty jobs which, although necessary, have to remain concealed from the public gaze - Unsere Ehre heisst Treue. We find this stance, a kind of mirror-reversal of the Beautiful Soul which refuses to dirty its hands, at its purest in the Rightist admiration for the heroes who are ready to do the necessary dirty job: it is easy to do a noble thing for one's country, up to sacrificing one's life for it - it is much more difficult to commit a CRIME for one's country when it is needed... Hitler knew very well how to play this double game apropos the holocaust, using Himmler as his Hagen. In the speech to the SS leaders in Posen on October 4 1943, Himmler spoke quite openly about the mass killing of the Jews as "a glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and never can be written," explicitly including the killing of women and children: "I did not regard myself as justified in exterminating the men - that is to say, to kill them or have them killed - and to allow the avengers in the shape of children to grow up for our sons and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the earth."
This is Hagen's Treue brought to extreme - however, was the paradoxical price for Wagner's negative portrayal of Hagen not his Judifizierung? A lot of historicist work was done recently trying to bring out the contextual ťtrue meaningŤ of the Wagnerian figures and topics: the pale Hagen is really a masturbating Jew; Amfortas' wound is really syphillis... The idea is that Wagner is mobilizing historical codes known to everyone in his epoch: when a person stumbles, sings in cracking high tones, makes nervous gestures, etc., everyone knew this is a Jew, so Mime from Siegfried is a caricature of a Jew; the fear of syphillis as the illness in the groin one gets from having intercourse with an impure woman was an obsession in the second half of the 19th century, so it was clear to everyone that Amfortas really contracted syphillis from Kundry... Marc Weiner developed the most perspicuous version of this decoding by focusing on the micro-texture of Wagner's musical dramas - manner of singing, gestures, smells - it is at this level of what Deleuze would have called pre-subjective affects that anti-Semitism is operative in Wagner's operas, even if Jews are not explicitly mentioned: in the way Beckmesser sings, in the way Mime complains...
However, the first problem here is that, even if accurate, such insights do not contribute much to a pertinent understanding of the work in question. One often hears that, in order to understand a work of art, one needs to know its historical context. Against this historicist commonplace, one should affirm that too much of a historical context can blur the proper contact with a work of art - in order to properly grasp, say, Parsifal, one should ABSTRACT from such historical trivia, one should DECONTEXTUALIZE the work, tear it out from the context in which it was originally embedded. Even more, it is, rather, the work of art itself which provides a context enabling us to properly understand a given historical situation. If, today, someone were to visit Serbia, the direct contact with raw data there would leave him confused. If, however, he were to read a couple of literary works and see a couple of representative movies, they would definitely provide the context that would enable him to locate the raw data of his experience. There is thus an unexpected truth in the old cynical wisdom from the Stalinist Soviet Union: "he lies as an eye-witness!"
What further complicates the issue is the ambiguity of Wagner's depicting. Let us return to the most convincing case: Mime as the caricature of a ghetto-Jew - but was Wagner not also critical of Siegfried's cruel treatment of Mime? There is effectively in Wagner's Siegfried an unconstrained "innocent" aggressivity, an urge to directly pass to the act and just squash what gets on your nerves - as in Siegfrid's words to Mime in the Act I of Siegfried:
seh'ich dich stehn, gangeln und gehn,
knicken und nicken,
mit den Augen zwicken,
beim Genick moecht'ich den Nicker packen,
den Garaus geben dem garst'gen Zwicker!.
Is this not the most elementary disgust, repulsion felt by the ego when confronted with the intruding foreign body? One can easily imagine a neo-Nazi skinhead uttering the same words in the face of a worn-out Turkish Gastarbeiter...
And, finally, one should not forget that, in the Ring, the source of all evil is not Alberich's fatal choice in the first scene of Rhinegold: long before this event took place, Wotan broke the natural balance, succumbing to the lure of power, giving preference to power over love - he tore out and destroyed the World-Tree, making out of it his spear on which he inscribed the runes fixating the laws of his rule, plus he pluck out one of his eyes in order to gain insight into inner truth. Evil thus does not come from the Outside - the insight of Wotan's tragic monologue with Brunhilde in the Act II of Walkure is that the power of Alberich and the prospect of the end of the world is ultimately Wotan's own guilt, the result of his ethical fiasco - in Hegelese, external opposition is the effect of inner contradiction. No wonder, then, that Wotan is called the "White Alb" in contrast to the "Black Alb" Alberich - if anything, Wotan's choice was ethically worse than Alberich's: Alberich longed for love and only turned towards power after being brutally mocked and turned down by the Rhinemaidens, while Wotan turned to power after fully enjoying the fruits of love and getting tired of them. One should also bear in mind that, after his moral fiasco in Walkure, Wotan turns into "Wanderer" - a figure of the Wandering Jew like already the first great Wagnerian hero, the Flying Dutchman, this "Ahasver des Ozeans."
And the same goes for Parsifal which is not about an elitist circle of the pure-blooded threatened by external contamination (copulation by the Jewess Kundry). There are two complications to this image: first, Klingsor, the evil magician and Kundry's Master, is himself an ex-Grail knight, he comes from within; second point, if one reads the text really close, one cannot avoid the conclusion that the true source of evil, the primordial imbalance which derailed the Grail community, resides at its very center - it is Titurel's excessive fixation of enjoying the Grail which is at the origins of the misfortune. The true figure of Evil is Titurel, this obscene pčre-jouisseur. (Perhaps comparable to giant worm-like members of the Space Guild from Frank Herbert's Dune, whose bodies are disgustingly distorted because of their excessive consumption of the "spice").
This, then, undermines the anti-Semitic perspective according to which the disturbance always ultimately comes from outside, in the guise of a foreign body which throws out of joing the balance of the social organism: for Wagner, the external intruder (Alberich) is just a secondary repetition, externalization, of an absolutely immanent inconsistency/antagonism (of Wotan). With reference to Brecht's famous "What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?", one is tempted to say: "What is a poor Jew's stealing of the gold compared to the violence of the Aryan's (Wotan's) grounding of the rule of Law?" Flimm was right to focus his staging on this political drama of power: this is what accounts for Wagner's continuous actuality.
So where do we stand with this actuality? When one approaches the Festspielhaus during intermissions, the first impression, of course, is that of a scene from a Fellini film: aseptic old men in dark dresses silently roaming around, accompanied by ladies with too much make-up, a true dance of the vampires, a reunion of living dead playing high society... Is, however, this the entire truth? Or was Boulez right when, back in the 1960s, in one of his memorable anarchic-avantgarde outbursts, he said that all opera houses should be bombed - except Bayreuth.
The fact remains that the Bayreuth stagings (or, rather, the stagings of Wagner in general) provide the most accurate registration of our global spiritual and political preoccupations. Recall the Parsifals of the last decades: everything was there, from ecological concerns to New Age spirituality, from space-technology to political revolutions and youth rebellions... More generally, do the great shifts in Wagner stagings not condense the triad of Traditionalism-Modernism-Postmodernism? Before the World War II, traditional settings of the Ring predominated: naturalistic background of wild rocks and trees, Viking-like heroes... Then, in 1950, there occurred the New Bayreuth explosion of radical modernism: ascetic, pseudo Ancient Greek tunics, empty stages with strong lights and just some minimal simple object with runes here and there. In the 1960, Wagner stagings were at the frontline of postmodernism in all its versions: the inconsistent mixture of heterogeneous styles and settings (Rhine daughters as prostitutes, the conflict between Siegfried and Hagen as a conflict between SA and SS, Walhalla's executive offices...), the changes in the narrative (Isolde stays at home and Tristan dies alone, the Dutchman is Senta's hysterical hallucination...).
In this way, Bayreuth - and Wagner's work itself - is more and more emerging as an insurpassable canon, comparable only to Greek tragedies and Shakespeare: not a foundation with a fixed meaning, but the permanent frame of reference which calls for new and new stagings, which has to be fed by them in order to remain alive. It is through a new staging of Wagner that we make it clear to ourselves where do we stand, in the most radical existential sense, and the power of Wagner's opus is precisely that it survives new and new interpretations.
Imagine - my private dream - a Parsifal taking place in a modern megalopolis, with Klingsor as an impotent pimp running a whorehouse; he uses Kundry to seduce members of the Grail circle, a rival drug gang. Grail is run by the wounded Amfortas whose father Titurel is in a constant delirium induced by too much drugs; Amfortas is under a terrible pressure from the members of his gang to perform the ritual, i.e., deliver the daily portion of drugs to them. Parsifal is a young inexperienced son of a single homeless mother in search of drugs, and he "feels the pain" and rejects Kundry's advances while she is performing fellatio on him... Such experiments, of course, are risky, they often ridiculously misfire - however, not always, and there is no way to tell it in advance, so one has to take the risk.
Bayreuth, which was proclaimed dead, dismissed as outdated, at its very conception, is today more alive than the majority of those who organized its funerals. Again and again, it reemerges as the Mecca of European cultural fundamentalists - the site of their hadj, sacred pilgrimage - you have to do it at least once in lifetime if you want your soul saved. And the core of this fundamentalists is no longer composed by hard-core conservatives: as an American critic recently remarked, Wagner's Ring was in the last years almost kidnapped by Leftist Jewish directors - in a weird case of poetic justice, you have to go to the American West (to Seattle) in order to enjoy the "authentic" Teutonic Ring...
There was, in the last months, after the public letters from Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and other philosophers, a lot of talk about the revival of the core European values as an antidote to the Americanized New World Order. If there is a cultural event in which, today, this European tradition condenses and embodies itself, it is Bayreuth - so, to paraphrase Max Horkheimer, those who do not want to talk about Bayreuth should also keep silent about Europe.
Theodor Adorno's critical analysis of popular music in capitalist society.
Theodor W. Adorno
On Popular Music
With the assistance and collaboration of George Simpson
The Musical Material
The Two Spheres of Music
[1] Popular music, which produces the stimuli we are here investigating, is usually characterized by its difference from serious music. This difference is generally taken for granted and is looked upon as a difference of levels considered so well defined that most people regard the values within them as totally independent of one another. We deem it necessary, however, first of all to translate these so-called levels into more precise terms, musical as well as social, which not only delimit them unequivocally but throw light upon the whole setting of the two musical spheres as well.
[2] One possible method of achieving this clarification would be a historical analysis of the division as it occurred in music production and of the roots of the two main spheres. Since, however, the present study is concerned with the actual function of popular music in its present status, it is more advisable to follow the line of characterization of the phenomenon itself as it is given today than to trace it back to its origins. This is the more justified as the division into the two spheres of music took place in Europe long before American popular music arose. American music from its inception accepted the division as something pre-given, and therefore the historical background of the division applies to it only indirectly. Hence we seek, first of all, an insight into the fundamental characteristics of popular music in the broadest sense.
[3] A clear judgment concerning the relation of serious music to popular music can be arrived at only by strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization.<1> The whole structure of popular music is standardized, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization. Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific ones. Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note. The general types of hits are also standardized: not only the dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is understood, but also the "characters" such as mother songs, home songs, nonsense or "novelty" songs, pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost girl. Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit--the beginning and the end of each part--must beat out the standard scheme. This scheme emphasizes the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what has harmonically intervened. Complications have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.
[4] The details themselves are standardized no less than the form, and a whole terminology exists for them such as break, blue chords, dirty notes. Their standardization, however, is somewhat different from that of the framework. It is not overt like the latter but hidden behind a veneer of individual "effects" whose prescriptions are handled as the experts' secret, however open this secret may be to musicians generally. This contrasting character of the standardization of the whole and part provides a rough, preliminary setting for the effect upon the listener.
[5] The primary effect of this relation between the framework and the detail is that the listener becomes prone to evince stronger reactions to the part than to the whole. His grasp of the whole does not lie in the living experience of this one concrete piece of music he has followed. The whole is pre-given and pre- accepted, even before the actual experience of the music starts: therefore, it is not likely to influence, to any great extent, the reaction to the details, except to give them varying degrees of emphasis. Details which occupy musically strategic positions in the framework--the beginning of the chorus or its reentrance after the bridge--have a better chance for recognition and favorable reception than details not so situated, for instance, middle bars of the bridge. But this situational nexus never interferes with the scheme itself. To this limited situational extent the detail depends upon the whole. But no stress is ever placed upon the whole as a musical event, nor does the structure of the whole ever depend upon the details.
[6] Serious music, for comparative purposes, may be thus characterized: Every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere enforcement of a musical scheme. For example, in the introduction of the first movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony the second theme (in C-major) gets its true meaning only from the context. Only through the whole does it acquire its particular Iyrical and expressive quality--that is, a whole built up of its very contrast with the cant us hrmus-like character of the first theme. Taken in isolation the second theme would be disrobed to insignihcance. Another example may be found in the beginning of the recapitulation over the pedal point of the first movement of Beethoven's "Appassionata." By following the preceding outburst it achieves the utmost dramatic momentum. By omitting the exposition and development and starting with this repetition, all is lost.
[7] Nothing corresponding to this can happen in popular music. It would not affect the musical sense if any detail were taken out of the context; the listener can supply the "framework" automatically, since it is a mere musical automatism itself. The beginning of the chorus is replaceable by the beginning of innumerable other choruses. The interrelationship among the elements or the relationship of the elements to the whole would be unaffected. In Beethoven, position is important only in a living relation between a concrete totality and its concrete parts. In popular music, position is absolute. Every detail is substitutable; it serves its function only as a cog in a machine.
[8] The mere establishment of this difference is not yet suffcient. It is possible to object that the far-reaching standard schemes and types of popular music are bound up with dance, and therefore are also applicable to dance derivatives in serious music, for example, the minuet to and scherzo of the classical Viennese School. It may be maintained either that this part of serious music is also to be comprehended in terms of detail rather than of whole, or that if the whole still is perceivable in the dance types in serious music despite recurrence of the types, there is no reason why it should not be perceivable in modern popular music.
[9] The following consideration provides an answer to both objections by showing the radical differences even where serious music employs dance types. According to current formalistic views the scherzo of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony can be regarded as a highly stylized minuet to. What Beethoven takes from the traditional minuet to scheme in this scherzo is the Idea of outspoken contrast between a minor minuet to, a major trio, and repetition of the minor minuet to; and also certain other characteristics such as the emphatic three-fourths rhythm often accentuated on the first fourth and, by and large, dance like symmetry in the sequence of bars and periods. But the specific form-idea of this movement as a concrete totality transvaluates the devices borrowed from the minuet to scheme. The whole movement is conceived as an introduction to the hnale in order to createtremendous tension, not only by its threatening, foreboding expression but even more by the very way in which its formal development is handled.
[10] The classical minuet to scheme required first the appearance of the main theme, then the introduction of a second part which may lead to more distant tonal regions--formalistically similar, to be sure, to the "bridge" of today's popular music--and finally the recurrence of the original part. All this occurs in Beethoven. He takes up the idea of thematic dualism within the scherzo part. But he forces what was, in the conventional minuet to, a mute and meaningless game rule to speak with meaning. He achieves complete consistency between the formal structure and its specific content, that is to say, the elaboration of its themes. The whole scherzo part of this scherzo (that is to say, what occurs before the entrance of the deep strings in C-major that marks the beginning of the trio), consists of the dualism of two themes, the creeping figure in the strings and the "objective," stone like answer of the wind instruments. This dualism is not developed in a schematic way so that first the phrase of the strings is elaborated, then the answer of the winds, and then the string theme is mechanically repeated. After the first occurrence of the second theme in the horns, the two essential elements are alternately interconnected in the manner of a dialogue, and the end of the scherzo part is actually marked, not by the first but by the second theme, which has overwhelmed the first musical phrase.
[11] Furthermore, the repetition of the scherzo after the trio is scored so differently that it sounds like a mere shadow of the scherzo and assumes that haunting character which vanishes only with the afffirmative entry of the Finale theme. The whole device has been made dynamic. Not only the themes, but the musical form itself have been subjected to tension: the same tension which is already manifcst within the twofold structure of the first theme that consists, as it were, of question and reply, and then even more manifest within the context between the two main themes. The whole scheme has become sub ject to the inherent demands of this particular movement.
[12] To sum up the difference: in Beethoven and in good serious music in general--we are not concerned here with bad serious music which may be as rigid and mechanical as popular music--the detail virtually contains the whole and leads to the exposition of the whole, while, at the same time, it is produced out of the conception of the whole. In popular music the relationship is fortuitous. The detail has no bearing on a wholes, which appears as an extraneous framework. Thus, the whole is never altered by the individual event and therefore remains, as it were, aloof, imperturbable, and unnoticed throughout the piece. At the same time, the detail is mutilated by a device which it can never influence and alter, so that the detail remains inconsequential. A musical detail which is not permitted to develop becomes a caricature of its own potentialities.
Standardization
[13] The previous discussion shows that the difference between popular and serious music can be grasped in more precise terms than those referring to musical levels such as "lowbrow and highbrow," "simple and complex," "naive and sophisticated." For example, the difference between the spheres cannot be adequately expressed in terms of complexity and simplicity. All works of the earlier Viennese classicism are, without exception, rhythmically simpler than stock arrangements of jazz. Melodically, the wide intervals of a good many hits such as "Deep Purple" or "Sunrise Serenade" are more diffficult to follow per se than most melodies of, for example, Haydn, which consist mainly of circumscriptions of tonic triads and second steps. Harmonically, the supply of chords of the so-called classics is invariably more limited than that of any current Tin Pan Alley composer who draws from Debussy, Ravel, and even later sources. Standardization and non standardization are the key contrasting terms for the difference.
[14] Structural Standardization Aims at Standard Reactions. Listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its promoters but, as it were by the inherent nature of this music itself, into a system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society. This has nothing to do with simplicity and complexity. In serious music, each musical element, even the simplest one, is "itself," and the more highly organized the work is, the less possibility there is of substitution among the details. In hit music, however, the structure underlying the piece is abstract, existing independent of the specific course of the music. This is basic to the illusion that certain complex harmonies are more easily understandable in popular music than the same harmonies in serious music. For the complicated in popular music never functions as "itself" but only as a disguise or embellishment behind which the scheme can always be perceived. In jazz the amateur listener is capable of replacing complicated rhythmical or harmonic formulas by the schematic ones which they represent and which they still suggest, however adventurous they appear. The ear deals with the diffficulties of hit music by achieving slight substitutions derived from the knowledge of the patterns. The listener, when faced with the complicated, actually hears only the simple which it represents and perceives the complicated only as a parodistic distortion of the simple.
[15] No such mechanical substitution by stereotyped patterns is possible in serious music. Here even the simplest event necessitates an effort to grasp it immediately instead of summarizing it vaguely according to institutionalized prescriptions capable of producing only institutionalized effects.
Otherwise the music is not "understood." Popular music, however, is composed In such a way that the process of translation of the unique into the norm is already planned and, to a certain extent, achieved within the composition itself. [16] The composition hears for the listener. This is how popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes. Not only does it not require his effort to follow its concrete stream; it actually gives him models under which anything concrete still remaining may be subsumed. The schematic buildup dictates the way in which he must listen while, at the same time, it makes any effort in listening unnecessary. Popular music is "pre- digested" in a way strongly resembling the fad of "digests" of prmted Material. It is this structure of contemporary popular music which in the last analysis, accounts for those changes of listening habits which we shall later discuss.
[17] So far standardization of popular music has been considered in structural terms--that is, as an inherent quality without explicit reference to the process of production or to the underlying causes for standardization. Though all industrial mass production necessarily eventuates in standardization, the production of popular music can be called "industrial" only in its promotion and distribution, whereas the act of producing a song-hit still remains in a handicraft stage. The production of popular music is highly centralized in its economic organization, but still "individualistic" in its social mode of production. The division of labor among the composer, harmonizer, and arranger is not industrial but rather pretends industrialization, in order to look more up-to-date, whereas it has actually adapted industrial methods for the technique of its promotion. It would not increase the costs of production if the various composers of hit tunes did not follow certain standard patterns. Therefore, we must look for other reasons for structural standardization--very different reasons from those which account for the standardization of motor cars and breakfast foods.
[18] Imitation offers a lead for coming to grips with the basic reasons for it. The musical standards of popular music were originally developed by a competitive process. As one particular song scored a great success, hundreds of others sprang up imitating the successful one. The most successful hits types, and "ratios" between elements were imitated, and the process culminated in the crystallization of standards. Under centralized conditions such as exist today these standards have become "frozen."<2> That is, they have been taken over by cartelized agencies, the final results of a competitive process, and rigidly enforced upon material to be promoted. Noncompliance with the rules of the game became the basis for exclusion. The original patterns that are now standardized evolved in a more or less competitve way. Large-scale economic concentration institutionalized the standardization, and made it imperative. As a result, innovations by rugged individualists have been outlawed. The standard patterns have become invested with the immunity of bigness--"the King can do no wrong." This also accounts for revivals in popular music. They do not have the outworn character of standardized products manufactured after a given pattern. The breath of free competition is still alive within them. On the other hand, the famous old hits which are revived set the patterns which have become standardized. They are the golden age of the game rules.
[19] This "freezing" of standards is socially enforced upon the agencies themselves. Popular music must simultaneously meet two demands. One is for stimuli that provoke the listener's attention. The other is for the material to fall within the category of what the musically untrained listener would call "natural" music: that is, the sum total of all the conventions and material formulas in music to which he is accustomed and which he regards as the inherent, simple language of music itself, no matter how late the development might be which produced this natural language. This natural language for the American listener stems from his earliest musical experiences, the nursery rhymes, the hymns he sings in Sunday school, the little tunes he whistles on his way home from school. All these are vastly more important in the formation of musical language than his ability to distinguish the beginning of Brahms's Third Symphony from that of his Second. Of ficial musical culture is, to a large extent, a mere superstructure of this underlying musical language, namely, the major and minor tonalities and all the tonal relationships they imply. But these tonal relationships of the primitive musical language set barriers to whatever does not conform to them. Extravagances are tolerated only insofar as they can be recast into this so-called natural language.
[20] In terms of consumer demand, the standardization of popular music is only the expression of this dual desideratum imposed upon it by the musical frame of mind of the public--that it be "stimulatory" by deviating in some way from the established "natural," and that it maintain the supremacy of the natural against such deviations. The attitude of the audiences toward the natural language is reinforced by standardized production, which institutionalizes desiderata which originally might have come from the public.
Pseudo-individualization
[21] The paradox in the desiderata--stimulatory and natural--accounts for the dual character of standardization itself. Stylization of the ever identical framework is only one aspect of standardization. Concentration and control in our culture hide themselves in their very manifestation. Unhidden they would provoke resistance. Therefore the illusion and, to a certain extent, even the reality of individual achievement must be maintained. The maintenance of it is grounded in material reality itself, for while administrative control over life processes is concentrated, ownership is still diffuse.
[22] In the sphere of luxury production, to which popular music belongs and in which no necessities of life are immediately involved, while, at the same time, the residues of individualism are most alive there in the form of ideological categories such as taste and free choice, it is imperative to hide standardization. The "backwardness" of musical mass production, the fact that it is still on a handicraft level and not literally an industrial one, conforms pcrfectly to that necessity which is essential from the viewpoint of cultural big business. If the individual handicraft elements of popular music were abolished altogether, a synthetic means of hiding standardization would have to be evolved. Its elements are even now in existence.
[23] The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo- individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or "pre-digested."
[24] The most drastic example of standardization of presumably individualized features is to be found in so-called improvisations. Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so "normalized" as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of individualization: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the inside story. This pseudo-individualization is prescribed by the standardization of the framework. The latter is so rigid that the freedom it allows for any sort of improvisation is severely delimited. Improvisations--passages where spontaneous action of individuals is permitted ("Swing it boys")--are confined within the walls of the harmonic and metric schcmc-. In a great many cases, such as the "break" of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain, due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying harmonic functions. Sincc thc-se possibilities were very quickly exhausted, stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardization of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own deviation--pseudo-individualization.
[25] This subservience of improvisation to standardization explains two main socio-psychological qualities of popular music. One is the fact that the detail remains openly connected with the underlying scheme so that the listener always feels on safe ground. The choice in individual alterations is so small that the perpetual recurrence of the same variations is a reassuring signpost of the identical behind them. The other is the function of "substitution"--the improvisatory features forbid their being grasped as musical events inthemselves. They can be received only as embellishments. It is a well-known fact that in daring jazz arrangements worried notes, dirty notes, in other words, false notes, play a conspicuous role. They are apperceived as exciting stimuli only because they are corrected by the ear to the right note. This, however, is only an extreme instance of what happens less conspicuously in all individualization in popular music. Any harmonic boldness, any chord which does not fall strictly within the simplest harmonic scheme demands being apperceived as "false," that is, as a stimulus which carries with it the unambiguous prescription to substitute for it the right detail, or rather the naked scheme. Understanding popular music means obeying such commands for listening. Popular music commands its own listening habits.
[26] There is another type of individualization claimed in terms of kinds of popular music and differences in name bands. The types of popular music are carefully differentiated in production. The listener is presumed to be able to choose between them. The most widely recognized differentiations are those between swing and sweet and such name bands as Benny Goodman and Guy Lombardo. The listener is quickly able to distinguish the types of music and even the performing band, this in spite of the fundamental identity of the material and the great similarity of the presentations apart from their emphasized distinguishing trademarks. This labeling technique, as regards type of music and band, is pseudo-individualization, but of a sociological kind outside the realm of strict musical technology. It provides trademarks of identification for differentiating between the actually undifferentiated.
[27] Popular music becomes a multiple-choice questionnaire. There are two main types and their derivatives from which to choose. The listener is encouraged by the inexorable presence of these types psychologically to cross out what he dislikes and check what he likes. The limitation inherent in this choice and the clear-cut alternative it entails provoke like-dislike patterns of behavior. This mechanical dichotomy breaks down indifference it is imperative to fdvor sweet or swing if one wishes to continue to listen to popular music.
THEORY ABOUT THE LISTENER
Popular Music and "Leisure Time"
[28] In order to understand why this whole type of music (i.e., popular music in general) maintains its hold on the masses, some considerations of a general kind may be appropriate.
[29] The frame of mind to which popular music originally appealed, on which it feeds, and which it perpetually reinforces, is simultaneously one of distraction and inattention. Listeners are distracted from the demands of reality by entertainment which does not demand attention either.
[30] The notion of distraction can be properly understood only within its social setting and not in self-subsistent terms of individual psychology. Distraction is bound to the present mode of production, to the rationalized and mechanized process of labor to which, directly or indirectly, masses are subject. This mode of production, which engenders fears and anxiety about unemployment, loss of income, war, has its "nonproductive" correlate in entertainment; that is, relaxation which does not involve the effort of concentration at all. People want to have fun. A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is possible only to those whose lives do not put such a strain on them that in their spare time they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously. The whole sphere of cheap commercial entertainment reflects this dual desire. It induces relaxation because it is patterned and pre-digested. Its being patterned and pre-digested serves within the psychological household of the masses to spare them the effort of that participation (even in listening or observation) without which there can be no receptivity to art. On the other hand, the stimuli they provide permit an escape from the boredom of mechanized labor.
[31] The promoters of commercialized entertainment exonerate themselves by referring to the fact that they are giving the masses what they want. This is an ideology appropriate to commercial purposes: the less the mass discriminates, the greater the possibility of selling cultural commodities indiscriminately. Yet this ideology of vested interest cannot be dismissed so easily. It is not possible completely to deny that mass consciousness can be molded by the operative agencies only because the masses "want this stuff."
[32] But why do they want this stuff? In our present society the masses themselves are kneaded by the same mode of production as the arti-craft material foisted upon them. The customers of musical entertainment are themselves objects or, indeed, products of the same mechanisms which determine the production of popular music. Their spare time serves only to reproduce their working capacity. It is a means instead of an end. The power of the process of production extends over the time intervals which on the surface appear to be "free." They want standardized goods and pseudo-individualization, because their leisure is an escape from work and at the same time is molded after those psychological attitudes to which their workaday world exclusively habituates them. Popular music is for the masses a perpetual bus man's holiday. Thus, there is justihcation for speaking of a preestablished harmony today between production and consumption of popular music. The people clamor for what they are going to get anyhow.
[33] To escape boredom and avoid effort are incompatible--hence the reproduction of the very attitude from which escape is sought. To be sure, the way in which they must work on the assembly line, in the factory, or at office machines denies people any novelty. They seek novelty, but the strain and boredom associated with actual work leads to avoidance of effort in that leisure time which offers the only chance for really new experience. As a substitute, they crave a stimulant. Popular music comes to offer it. Its stimulations are met with the inability to vest effort in the ever-identical. This means boredom again. It is a circle which makes escape impossible. The impossibility of escape causes the widespread attitude of inattention toward popular music. The moment of recognition is that of effortless sensation. The sudden attention attached to this moment burns itself out instanter and relegates the listener to a realm of inattention and distraction. On the one hand, the domain of production and plugging presupposes distraction and, on the other, produces it.
[34] In this situation the industry faces an insoluble problem. It must arouse attention by means of ever-new products, but this attention spells their doom. If no attention is given to the song, it cannot be sold; if attention is paid to it, there is always the possibility that people will no longer accept it, because they know it too well. This partly accounts for the constantly renewed effort to sweep the market with new products, to hound them to their graves; then to repeat the infanticidal maneuver again and again.
[35] On the other hand, distraction is not only a presupposition but also a product of popular music. The tunes themselves lull the listener to inattention. They tell him not to worry for he will not miss anything.<3>
The Social Cement
[36] It is safe to assume that music listened to with a general inattention which is only interrupted by sudden flashes of recognition is not followed as a sequence of experiences that have a clear-cut meaning of their own, grasped in each instant and related to all the precedent and subsequent moments. One may go so far as to suggest that most listeners of popular music do not understand music as a language in itself. If they did it would be vastly difficult to explain how they could tolerate the incessant supply of largely undifferentiated material. What, then, does music mean to them? The answer is that the language that is music is transformed by objective processes into a language which they think is their own--into a language which serves as a receptacle for their institutionalized wants. The less music is a language sz~i ge~eris to them, the more does it become established as such a receptacle. The autonomy of music is replaced by a mere socio-psychological function. Music today is largely a social cement. And the meaning listeners attribute to a material, the inherent logic of which is inaccessible to them, is above all a means by which they achieve some psychical adjustment to the mechanisms of present-day life. This "adjustment" materializes in two different ways, corresponding to two major socio- psychological types of mass behavior toward music in general and popular music in particular, the "rhythmically obedient" type and the "emotional" type.
[37] Individuals of the rhythmically obedient type are mainly found among the youth--the so-called radio generation. They are most susceptible to a process of masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism. The type is not restricted to any one political attitude. The adjustment to anthropophagous collectivism is found as often among left-wing political groups as among right-wing groups. Indeed, both overlap: repression and crowd mindedness overtake the followers of both trends. The psychologies tend to meet despite the surface distinctions in political attitudes.
[38] This comes to the fore in popular music which appears to be aloof from political partisanship. It may be noted that a moderate leftist theater production such as Pins and Needles uses ordinary jazz as its musical medium, and that a communist youth organization adapted the melody of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" to its own lyrics. Those who ask for a song of social significance ask for it through a medium which deprives it of social significance. The uses of inexorable popular musical media is repressive per se. Such inconsistencies indicate that political conviction and socio-psychological structure by no means coincide.
[39] This obedient type is the rhythmical type, the word "rhythmical" being used in its everyday sense. Any musical experience of this type is based upon the underlying, unabating time unit of the music--its "beat." To play rhythmically means, to these people, to play in such a way that even if pseudo- individualizations--counter-accents and other "differentiations"-occur, the relation to the ground meter is preserved. To be musical means to them to be capable of following given rhythmical patterns without being disturbed by "individualizing" aberrations, and to fit even the syncopations into the basic time units. This is the way in which their response to music immediately expresses their desire to obey. However, as the standardized meter of dance music and of marching suggests the coordinated battalions of a mechanical collectivity, obedience to this rhythm by overcoming the responding individuals leads them to conceive of themselves as agglutinized with the untold millions of the meek who must be similarly overcome. Thus do the obedient inherit the earth.
[40] Yet, if one looks at the serious compositions which correspond to this category of mass listening, one finds one very characteristic feature: that of disillusion. All these composers, among them Stravinsky and Hindemith, have expressed an "anti romantic" feeling. They aimed at musical adaptation to reality--a reality understood by them in terms of the "machine age." The renunciation of dreaming by these composers is an index that listeners are ready to replace dreaming by adjustment to raw reality, that they reap new pleasure from their acceptance of the unpleasant. They are disillusioned about any possibility of realizing their own dreams in the world in which they live, and consequently adapt themselves to this world. They take what is called a realistic attitude and attempt to harvest consolation by identifying themselves with the external social forces which they think constitute the "machine age." Yet the very disillusion upon which their coordination is based is there to mar their pleasure. The cult of the machine which is represented by unabating jazz beats involves a self-renunciation that cannot but take root in the form of a fluctuating uneasiness somewhere in the personality of the obedient. For the machine is an end in itself only under given social conditions--where men are appendages of the machines on which they work. The adaptation to machine music necessarily implies a renunciation of one's own human feelings and at the same time a fetishism of the machine such that its instrumental character becomes obscured thereby.
[41] As to the other, the "emotional" type, there is some justification for linking it with a type of movie spectator. The kinship is with the poor shop girl who derives gratification by identification with Ginger Rogers, who with her beautiful legs and unsullied character, marries the boss. Wish fulfillment IS Considered the guiding principle in the social psychology of moving Pictures and similarly in the pleasure obtained from emotional erotic music. This explanation, however, is only superficially appropriate.
[42] Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley may be dream factories. But they do not merely supply categorical wish fulfillment for the girl behind the counter. She does not immediately identify herself with Ginger Rogers marrying. What does occur may be expressed as follows: when the audience at a sentimental film or sentimental music become aware of the overwhelming possibility of happiness, they dare to confess to themselves what the whole order of contemporary life ordinarily forbids them to admit, namely, that they actually have no part in happiness. What is supposed to be wish fulfillment is only the scant liberation that occurs with the realization that at last one need not deny oneself the happiness of knowing that one is unhappy and that one could be happy. The experience of the shop girl is related to that of the old woman who weeps at the wedding services of others, blissfully becoming aware of the wretchedness of her own life. Not even the most gullible individuals believe that eventually everyone will win the sweepstakes. The actual function of sentimental music lies rather in the temporary release given to the awareness that one has missed fulfillment.
[43] The emotional listener listens to everything in terms of late romanticism and of the musical commodities derived from it which are already fashioned to fit the needs of emotional listening. They consume music in order to be allowed to weep. They are taken in by the musical expression of frustration rather than by that of happiness. The influence of the standard Slavic melancholy typified by Tchaikowsky and Dvorak is by far greater than that of the most "fulfilled" moments of Mozart or of the young Beethoven. The so-called releasing element of music is simply the opportunity to feel something. But the actual content of this emotion can only be frustration. Emotional music has become the image of the mother who says, "Come and weep, my child." It is catharsis for the masses, but catharsis which keeps them all the more firmly in line. One who weeps does not resist any more than one who marches. Music that permits its listeners the confession of their unhappiness reconciles them, by means of this "release," to their social dependence.
NOTES
<1> The basic importance of standardization has not altogether escaped the attention of current literature on popular music. "The chief difference between a popular song and a standard, or serious, song like 'Mandalay,' 'Sylvia,' or 'Trees,' is that the melody and the Iyric of a popular number are constructed within a definite pattern or structural form, whereas the poem, or Iyric, of a standard number has no structural confinements, and the music is free to interpret ~he meaning and feeling of the words without following a set pattern or form. Putting it another way, the popular song is 'custom built,' while the standard song allows the composer freer play of imagination and interpretation." Abner Silver and Robert Bruce, How to Wvite and Sel/ a Song Hit (New York, 1939), p.2. The authors fail, however, to realize the externally superimposed, commercial character of those patterns which aims at canalized reactions or, in the language of the regular announcement of one particular radio program, at "easy listening." They confuse the mechanical patterns with highly organized, strict art forms: "Certainly there are few more stringent verse forms in poetry than the sonnet, and yet the greatest poets of all time have woven undying beauty within its small and limited frame. A composer has just as much opportunity for exhibiting his talent and genius in popular songs as in more serious music" (pp. 2-3). Thus the standard pattern of popular music appears to them virtually on the same level as the law of a fugue. It is this contamination which makes the insight into the basic standardization of popular music sterile. It ought to be added that what Silver and Bruce call a "standard song" is just the opposite of what we mean by a standardized popular song.
<2> See Max Horkheimer, Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung 8 ( 1939), p. 115.
<3> The attitude of distraction is not a completely universal one. Particularly youngsters who invest popular music with their own feelings are not yet completely blunted to all its effects. The whole problem of age levels with regard to popular music, however, is beyond the scope of the present study. Demographic problems, too, must remain out of consideration.
